Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Massacre at Central High (1976)

When the black comedy Heathers was released to considerable
acclaim in 1988, some movie fans cried foul because Heathers appeared to cop its plot from Massacre at Central High, only with an ending that felt timid
compared to the climax of the earlier picture. That said, Heathers boasts verbal wit and visual style that Massacre at Central High cannot match,
since Massacre at Central High suffers
from shortcomings including cheap production values and inconsistent acting, so in some ways the latter film improves upon its predecessor, whether the association between the movies was accidental or deliberate. In any event,
watching Massacre at Central High
today is a very different experience than watching it during the mid-’70s, when Massacre at Central High was originally released, or even the early ’80s, when I first encountered the film
on cable. What once seemed like an outrageous revenge fantasy is now, sadly, an
everyday reality—so if you or someone you love has felt the impact of a school
shooting, chances are you will find Massacre
at Central High sensationalistic and unpleasant.

The movie opens with the
arrival of a new student at a generic suburban high school in Southern
California. David (Derrel Maury) doesn’t know anyone at his new school except
Mark (Andrew Stevens), a classmate from a previous institution. Luckily for David,
Mark belongs to a powerful clique of young men who rule the student body
through intimidation. Yet
David is an iconoclast with no stomach for bullies, so he rebuffs
invitations to join the ruling class. This puts David’s old friend Mark in a
tough spot, and it prompts the other bullies to make an example of the new guy.
The bullies attack David in an auto garage, disengaging a hydraulic lift and
dropping a car onto his leg. Once David recovers, he seeks revenge by murdering
the bullies, one by one, until Mark realizes what’s happening and forces a confrontation.

Writer-director Rene Daalder takes a highly stylized
approach to the film’s storytelling, so virtually no adults are depicted
onscreen; Daalder’s vision of American high school is that of a frontier where
the strong make the rules and the weak resist at great peril. Some of
the “kills” that Daalder stages are absurd, including an elaborate sequence
revolving around hang-gliders, but the head of narrative steam that Daalder develops
is potent. Furthermore, Daalder achieves that rare feat of actually
changing the movie’s focus from one character to another midstream—David is
introduced as the underdog hero, and then he morphs into a psychotic villain
while Mark assumes the hero’s mantle. Tricky stuff. Make no mistake, Massacre at Central High is a low-budget
B-movie, complete with a couple of leering nudie shots and a raft of underwritten
supporting characters. (In an amusing bit of cinematic irony, one of the
bullies’ victims is played by Robert Carradine, who later starred in 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds.) Rendering these
criticisms somewhat moot is Daalder’s determination to follow his outlandish
premise all the way to its logical conclusion, visiting dark places that most
teen movies of the same vintage fear to tread.